The Newsroom Gets Personal: A Review of The Paris Herald

James Oliver Goldsborough’s The Paris Herald narrates the workings of a newspaper as the sum of its human parts. The historical novel shows snapshots of the lives of different figures related to the eponymous historic English-language newspaper for Americans in Europe. Set during Charles de Gaulle’s tenure as President of France, the novel focuses on contemporary events of the time and the newspaper’s uncertain future.
Goldsborough traces the fate of The Paris Herald’s future in the late 1960s after the New York Herald Tribune, its parent publication, was forced to close in 1966. Through vignettes told from the perspective of reporters, publishers, and others linked to the Herald, the novel depicts the politics and the business of newspapers, particularities of life as an American in France, and the challenges brought on by fast-paced technological advances in publishing.
Goldsborough’s introductory note describes the prestigious history of The Paris Herald as the well-regarded American newspaper in Europe. He writes that his novel tells the intertwined stories of “when the newspaper and the regime of Charles de Gaulle were both fighting for their lives.” Though Goldsborough achieves this goal, this is not the main focus of the novel, particularly in its beginning.
While the overall story of The Paris Herald comes into being by the end of the novel, the perspective of its reporters, employees, and other related figures places the book’s focus primarily on the personal events and interpersonal relationships of their lives. Various narrators are recurring, while others tell just one story. These singular viewpoints offer some of the novel’s most poignant and memorable tales, ranging from the background of the Herald’s seemingly permanent distributor to the vindication of one reporter’s wife against her husband’s infidelity.
The stories of recurring narrators are similarly captivating, though the novel focuses significantly on the romantic and sexual relationships of these characters. Most of the characters adopt the famously liberal sexual commitment for which France is known. When combined with the fact that many mistresses are also their lovers’ secretaries, the 1960s Parisian setting is not hard to imagine. The focus on the personal lives of these characters, in which The Paris Herald seems to be a constant but peripheral feature of their lives, obscures the novel’s supposedly primary focus on the newspaper for a good portion of the novel.
While the novel’s personal vignettes are captivating and well-written, moving along personal plot lines in unusually short chapters, only the most attentive reader will be able to recall what position each character occupies in the turbulent 1960s ecosystem of the Herald. Though each character’s position is briefly introduced in one of the novel’s first chapters, the introduction is insufficient to fully inform the reader of the novel’s array of characters, particularly since the chapters themselves move quickly across time and space.
In spite of its fast pace, The Paris Herald ultimately brings together separate narrative strands to paint a vivid picture of the newspaper it memorializes. Through the changing times of late 1960s France, The Paris Herald conveys the importance of newspapers for reporting on pressing political issues and the role of the Herald in particular as a unique cultural feature of Paris. The novel places the reader in the city and leaves her with a view of the complicated lives of those who worked at The Paris Herald and the changes the newspaper weathered, but from which it never fully recovered.